Yeah, I've tried that with vim windows. It wasn't to my liking.
> your all shell interactions are within Emacs buffers, which give powerful workflow advantages if you want to refer to previous results, or if you want to do some ad-hoc scripting.
I'm not sure I'm understanding the advantage you see. I use named tmux sessions that survive beyond terminal closing that I reconnect to. I have history for months in those. I can use two of those and have an editing window and a window to see compile/test results. If it's a remote connection and the network fails, I just reconnect and reattach the tmux session, and I'm in the same position I was, with the exact same screen shown and history. I can move from home to work with the same amount of easy as well.
Since I would run tmux anyways just for that capability, I'm not sure the benefit I get out of folding both those windows into the editor, other than harder to manage resizing, and harder to manager if I want to add or remove windows temporarily.
I'm not sure what making the buffer part of the editor is gaining there specifically, but I think there is something that I'm not gleaning from how you're explaining it. I'm just not sure it's enough to counteract the pain of in-editor window management (for me).
With my workflow, Emacs is the window manager. It's good at that, especially in text mode.
While terminal emulation / alternatives in Emacs have some rough corners, your all shell interactions are within Emacs buffers, which give powerful workflow advantages if you want to refer to previous results, or if you want to do some ad-hoc scripting.